In the Limelight

March 16-22

Grammy-nominated violinist Andrés Cárdenes is the Santa Fe Symphony’s guest conductor for its March 18 concert at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. On the program are Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 4,” Rossini’s dramatic “Overture to L’italiana in Algeri “(The Italian Girl in Algiers), David Stock’s passionate “Suenos de Sefarad” and Mozart’s “Violin Concerto No. 2 in D Major” featuring Cárdenes on violin.

On March 16, GIG Performance Space hosts Lone Piñon, an acoustic ensemble from Northern New Mexico whose music celebrates the diversity of the region’s cultural roots. Jordan Wax, Noah Martinez and Leticia Gonzales play the violin, accordion, quinta huapangera, bajo sexto, guitarrón and tololoche and sing in Spanish, English, Nahuatl and P’urépecha.

Singer/songwriter Eryn Bent, who has been performing since the age of 14, plays at Cowgirl Santa Fe on March 20. A native of Montana who now calls Santa Fe home, Bent recorded her first studio album “Firefly,” which won a 2015 New Mexico Music Award, in 2014 at The Kitchen Sink Recording Studio.

Check out Santa Fe Arts Journal’snew YouTube video blog (https://youtu.be/RUZJfo9WQN4) that has additional arts information and enter the contest to win two free tickets to a performance of The Oasis Theatre Company’s new production “The Good Doctor.”

Santa Fe Arts Journalthanks Santa Fe artist Christopher Benson for allowing use of an image of his 11” x 14”, oil on linen painting “Small Hypnotic Seascape.” Christopher’s work can be viewed at his website bensonstudio.com.

Look

Katie O’Sullivan moved to Santa Fe three years ago to focus on her career as a painter.

What she didn’t expect to happen was to find female figures appearing in her work and see sadness in many of their eyes.

“When we’re out and about in the world, we always put on a happy face,” she says. “So when I saw sadness, struggle and fear in the eyes of the women I was painting, I started looking inside to learn more about myself.”

O’Sullivan displays her latest paintings in the two-artist show “Symbols of Our Inner Truths,” which opens on March 24 at TERRA Santa Fe. [Read More…]

Listen

Davis Parsons’ versatility as a choreographer is on display during Parsons Dance’s performance on April 6, which is presented at the Lensic Performing Arts Center by Performance Santa Fe.

The eclectic program, which features works created by Parsons from 1982 through 2017, shows the wide range of movements that has been exciting Parsons for more than 30 years.

“Caught,” a solo piece that was choreographed and danced by Parsons in 1982, has had a long and illustrious life. Dancers from Alvin Ailey to Mikhail Baryshnikov have presented this incredibly demanding work. [Read More…]

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Annell Livingston grew up on the south coast of Texas and enjoyed drawing and painting as a child. She loved color during her youth and still uses a wide range of subtle colors in her grid paintings, which are in exhibit in the two-artist show “Equilateral Attraction” that opens at Winterowd Fine Art on March 16.

“I always start with one color, which leads me to the next one,” she explains. “All I have to do is look outside my door to see some wonderful colors, especially at sunset. I always draw colors from nature. Colors flow organically from me.”

The paintings on display have been created during the past three years that Livingston has been working with acrylics. [Read More…]

Ceramic artist Ruth Weston and poet Jeanne Simonoff met at ViVO Contemporary in February to talk about their pairing in the gallery’s exhibit “Giving Voice to Image 6,” an annual show that opens on March 14 and showcases 2D and 3D work by gallery artists and original poems by local poets that have been inspired by these artworks.

“Jeanne looked at my work and chose Dreamer 2, which is part of a series of winged figures representing the illegal immigrants living in New Mexico,” explains Weston.

“To me, the wings represent the hope and dreams of the young immigrants to find a life in the United Sates away from the terrors of their first country.” [Read More…]

A former abstract painter, Eliza Twichell now turns her attention to creating automata, which are mechanized creatures and scenes. Her new installation at Axle Contemporary, “Ask the Honest Oracle,” opens in the mobile gallery’s van on March 9.

“Ask the Honest Oracle” consists of three life-size pieces. At the center of the exhibit is the Honest Oracle, a six-foot tall figure bolted to the wall that’s made out of a 1’ x 12’ board, plywood and paint. Visitors can ask him a question and get an answer by turning a crank.

Twichell also has constructed two talking heads, complete with moveable gears and levers. One figure is incessantly talking, while the other rolls its eyes in disgust. The third piece is a thought bubble. Visitors sit in a chair, ask a question and turn a crank to see words on stretched canvas attached to a wood frame.

“I have always been a tinkerer, always been curious about how things work, and I like to fix things,” explains Twichell, who earned a master of fine arts degree at Pratt Institute in New York. [Read More…]

Two 20th century works by living composers and a string quartet by Haydn are on the program presented by the Apple Hill String Quartet during Serenata of Santa Fe’s March 25 concert at First Presbyterian Church.

R. Luke DuBois is particularly excited about his show “A More Perfect Union” at SITE Santa Fe because it’s the first time he’s been able to exhibit work from all his political projects in the same show and see the evolution of these projects that were created from 2008 through 2017.

DuBois’ “Hindsight is Always 20/20,” 41 framed letterpress prints on Somerset paper, is central to the exhibit, which runs through April 4. These prints contain the top 66 words used most frequently in the first 41 presidents’ State of the Union addresses set up in the format of the Snellen eye chart.

“The State of the Union is an evolving body of rhetoric,” DuBois says. “I think a lot about language and ways in which language is used in our culture. A lot of what each president says is pretty different from the others. Reading their words is a real history lesson.” [Read More…]

Strangers Collective, an alliance of early career creatives, operates the cozy exhibition space No Land that has been hosting a wide variety of shows featuring work by emerging visual artists and writers since the spring of 2017.

In order to exhibit the work of a larger number of young creatives, Strangers Collective’s co-directors Kyle Farrell, Alex Gill and Jordan Eddy have teamed up with the spacious form and concept gallery to present the show “Mirror Box,” which opens on February 23 and runs through April 14.

“We did a lot of studio visits starting late last summer,” Farrell explains. “What we noticed is that many of the artists were touching on similar points. There wasn’t as much personal interior work but rather work that’s affected by the outer world and what’s happening outside ourselves.” [Read More…]

Even though Shelley Horton-Trippe’s show “High Brow Low Ride” features paintings created since the November 2016 election, the works are not political.

Horton-Trippe met the president of the Española Low Rider Club, whom she describes as “a young woman with foot high hair and eyeliner winged to the moon,” in the summer of 2017. This powerful female figure became the impetus for a new body of work that’s lighthearted, but not in a superficial way.

“High Brow Low Ride” opens at Phil Space on February 23 and runs through April 27.

“These paintings express a longing for pure joy,” says Horton-Trippe, who has been living and working in Santa Fe since 1979. Joy is easy to come by when Horton-Trippe’s six-year-old granddaughter stops by the studio to work side-by-side with her grandmother and watch her paint. [Read More…]

“Without Boundaries: Visual Conversations,” an exhibit opening on February 16 at IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), grew out of a series of conversations curated by artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska, MoCNA, Barnard College in New York and the Northern Norway Art Museum.

“Over a span of two years I brought together artists, scholars, activists and leaders to promote public discourse about issues affecting life in the North and beyond,” says Kelliher-Combs, who was raised in the Northwest Alaska community of Nome and earned her master of fine arts degree from Arizona State University.

“These conversations have taken the form of panel discussions, performances, installations and an exhibition. They have taken place in Alaska, Norway, Iceland and New Mexico and have been broadcast via the worldwide web.” [Read More…]

Curator Angie Rizzo had a chance to talk extensively with artist Ciel Bergman about her upcoming show of acrylic paintings on unstretched Belgian linen many months before Bergman passed away in 2017.

“These works, which were created between 1970 and 1977, haven’t been seen together in a show,” explains Rizzo, who curated the Center for Contemporary Arts’ new exhibit “The Linens” that opens in the Tank Garage on February 9.

“Ciel was so excited about this project,” Rizzo adds. “At the time she worked on these very large paintings, she was going through a real awakening in her life. It was a challenge to work on them, physically and artistically.” [Read More…]